The Favorite Sister, by Jessica Knoll

PERSONAL REVIEW: I debated about including this discussion guide on my blog because I feel the book has little merit.   I think the book is written for young females in their 20s and early 30s, so I may have a distorted opinion.  (I am way over 30!!)  I have several complaints including an incomplete sentence on page 54 (“Introducing two people who are…”).  My biggest concern is the joking manner in which the doctor referred to HPV on page 146.  Given that the book may be read by impressionable young women, I thought this was irresponsible!

Characters
Goal Diggers of New York City	Others
Jen Greenberg – original member Pop-up juice stands Stephanie Simmons – original member Three fiction books and memoir African American Adopted Brett Courtney – original member Cycling studio and philanthropy SPOKE Lauren Bunn – brought in by Jen Dating apps – SADIE and SADIEq Hayley – former cast member Kelly Courtney – brought in by Brett Layla – Daughter, age 12	Yvette Greenberg – Jen’s mother Jesse Barnes – show manager Lisa – show runner Sheila Lott – Stephanie’s biological mother Vince – Stephanie’s husband Arch – Brett’s girlfriend, Indian

For Discussion

NOTE: The page numbers are from the hardback edition.

1. What did you think about Brett and Kelly’s constant physical fighting?   Why do you think they continued to do that as adults?
2. As you were reading, did you think Brett literally died or was removed from the show like Haley?
3. The book introduced the following issues.  Are there any others you identified?   Did the novel do a good job addressing these issues and presenting them in a thought-provoking way?

a.       Sexual identity

b.       Body image and definition of healthy (page 15)

c.       Motherhood identifying a female, superseding accomplishments (page 25)

d.       Decision to have children or not

e.       Race

f.        Racial profiling

g.       Sexual abuse

h.       Alcohol abuses (Lauren)

i.         Depression (Stephanie)

j.         Night Eating Syndrome (Brett, page 179)

4.       How do you think the references to the current time will affect the popularity of the book?

a.       Page 277 – Bill Cosby

b.       Page 291 – Gone Girl

c.       Page 201 – “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”

d.       Page 201 –  Lauren Conrad and Heidi

5.       On page 139, Kelly defines a strong woman as having “to do with taking responsibility for your actions, even when it feels like you didn’t have choice in the matter, because you always have a choice.”  According to this definition, who were the strong women in the novel?  Do you agree with this definition?

6.       On page 146, are the comments about HPV appropriate?  In the novel the doctor who was treating Stephanie make jokes “about how you weren’t cool unless you had HPV.   Women who have HPV are women who have lived.”    Given the intended audience for this book, how will this idea be understood?

7.       Discuss the various characters.  How well did you understand them?   Which ones were the most sympathetic?  The most realistic?

8.       Is there anything realistic in this book?  Does it matter if there is not?

*****
First Semester Success, 2nd Edition, by Arden B. Hamer, is now available in both hard copy and eBook on amazon.com and in hard copy from wordassociation.com and barnesandnoble.com.  Click on the upper right  link.

The Living, by Annie Dillard

NOTE: There is a character list at the beginning of the novel.   These are the same characters rearranged in a different format.  There is also a short vocabulary quiz with words from the novel  at the end.

Characters

Clare Fishburn Rooney - father Ada – mother, second husband Norval Tawes June Randall – wife, Minta Homer’s sister Mabel – daughter Glee Fishburn – Clare’s brother Grace – wife Vinnie and Nesta - daughters Minta Randalal Honer Eustace – husband, drowned clearing log jam Bert, Lulu and Hugh – children Bert and Lulu died in fire Hugh built in fireplace Howard, Green and Ardeth – Queen of May’s children raised by Minta Hugh Honer – attending medical school Vinnie Fishburn – future wife

John Ireland Sharp Family all drowned except John Pearl – wife Children – Cyrus, Vincent, Rush and Horace Johnny Lee – railroad worker, then employed by Sharps Lee Chin – brother, killed by Beal Beal Obenchain Axel and Martha – parents, took in John Sharp when family drowned Nan – sister, married Will Ruffin Senator Green Randall and Louisa – Minta and June’s parents in Baltimore

For Discussion:

NOTE: Page numbers are from 2013 Harper Perennial paperback edition.

1. Discuss the character of Beal Obenchain.  His father “distrusted his son Beal, and thought him a shirker” (page 63).   Consider the incident when Beal was small and he ran off with the deer’s intestine while father tried to kill the deer (page 63).  When he quit going to school his teacher reflected that “he was a coward who studied bullying” (page 64).  John Ireland Sharp later thought that when they were boys, “Beal had possibly often been afraid of him” (page 64).  How did he develop into the man he became?  Was there anything that could have been done to stop him before he murdered Lee Chin and threatened Clare Fishburn?
2. When Minta’s family was coming to visit, she “saw the scene with fresh eyes, and wondered if her mother, father and June could find aught to admire in her Indian friends – or in any of her friends” (page 119).  How do you think the Randall’s thought about Minta’s life?  What would they admire or appreciate?
3. Discuss how the Nooksack Indians and the Bostonians viewed their wives.  The Bostonians thought the Nooksack “use their women like mules” (page 121) while the Nooksack “pitied the Boston women” (page 122) because their husbands hit them.  
4. Throughout the novel were references about how men evaluate each other.  Discuss how people from the different backgrounds in the novel evaluated each other.  What criteria do we use today to evaluate someone’s worth?  
1. Towards the end of chapter 23 Clare Fishburn recognized that Senator Randall was “his own man – given here where his sort of man was less than nothing” (page 137).  Clare thought “that a man could be any sort at all, if he could carry it off” (page 137). 
2. Senator Randall in the end judged Clare a “a nobody” but Claire mistook his courteousness as respect.
3. On page 432, after the law was passed mandating education, Clare did not challenge Will Ruffin when he vowed to not send his children to school.  Will Ruffin felt that because Clare did not take the challenge, that “he was an inferior man, after all.” 
5. Discuss being ordinary.  When Ada thought about her sons, Clare and Glee, she thought “the times had gotten inside them in some ways as they aged, and made them both ordinary.  Which they were not meant to be: no one is” (page 202).  What did she mean by “ordinary?”   Is it a negative characteristic to be ordinary?
6. Discuss Clare and June’s reactions to Beal’s threat to kill Clare.  Clare almost seemed to accept the inevitable and thought “He needed to learn how to die” (page 231).  June on the other hand wanted to kill Beal first.
7. What was Beal’s motivation to threaten to kill a person who he selected randomly?
8. To what did you attribute Beal’s change in attitude about his life?  In chapter 70 he considered his life “vile” and thought “If he was not, as he did not now feel himself to be, the exceptional and superior man, then he was no man” (page 410).
9. Discuss Pearl Sharp.  She excelled “inside her house’s walls” and was not interested in discussing “things for men and boys,” and so “settled into the complacent ignorance of some women of her station, such as it was, who wondered why men disrespected them” (page 248).  On the other hand, she often stole and “picked up a few mote things for the harmless refreshment of it” (page 248).    At the end of the novel she got the big house she wanted, started an orphanage, seemed to accept John moving alone to an island, and still stole from the town’s store.   How would you explain her character?
10. In chapter 69, John Ireland Sharp moved to the isolated island.  He felt he could “at last permit himself to give up on himself entirely” (page 402).  How did you view his move? 
11. Two children I found particularly interesting were Cyrus and Mabel. 
1. Cyrus – he went to life by himself in the woods at a young age and always held his yo-yo.  He returned to a normal life style when he was in high school and was on the school basketball team.
2. Mabel was always described as “limp” although she did not seem to be described as having a disability.
12. Discuss your reading experience.   Did you enjoy the novel?  What did you like or not like about it?

Vocabulary Quiz (Match the bolded word with a definition below.  Note that two words were not found in a modern dictionary.):

Page 177 – “One of these roisterers apparently got ‘bedoozled,’ …”

Page 201 – “The Pioneers let Rooney join because…there were not enough old-timers left by the late seventies to make a good club – not that they had all died, but they had quit the settlement, absquatulated…”

Page 243 – “In fact, she (Vinnie) brought to the least occasions a fervidity and an ardor that stimulated people…”

Page 273 – On the journey east, Minta had told the children that by custom, children were mute and sessile on trains…”

Page 284 – “June had been unnerved and vexed all week, all month.  She had left home for Baltimore in a swivet.”

Page 352 – “Rush’s interesting brother Cyrus had caught a striped snake hours ago, and the children had passes it from arm to arm and stuck their fingertips in its mouth, seeking to give their mothers the pleefer, to astounding success.”

Definitions:

1. Permanently attached to a base
2. State of nervous excitement
3. Enthusiasm
4. Fled or absconded
5. Not in dictionary
6. Not in dictionary

*****

First Semester Success: 2nd Edition, by Dr. Arden B. Hamer, is now available as an  eBook.   The paper edition will be available soon.  Click on the upper right link.

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

Characters

Roy Olive - mother Big Roy – adopted Roy Walter “Ghetto Yoda” – biological father Celestial – artist Mr. Davenport – father, inventor Gloria – mother, 2nd wife, educator Uncle Banks – lawyer Aunt Sylvia – taught Celestial to make dolls when she stayed with her after affair with professor Andre – Celestial’s childhood friend Evie and Carlos – parents Raul Gomez – Celestial’s professor at Howard, affair Tamar – Celestial’s assistant Davina Hardrick Antoine Gillory “Hopper” or “Grasshopper” - son

For Discussion:

NOTE: Page numbers are from hardback edition.

1. When the business card fell out of Roy’s wallet (page 10) or the receipt for two pieces of lingerie (page 163), did you think he was innocent of having an affair?  Did Celestial over react?  Was it all right if Roy liked to flirt if he did not take it any further?
2. When Celestial was making the doll to sell to the mayor, why did she make it look like Roy?  Why did she then show it to Roy’s mother?
3. Who do you think was right when Roy and Celestial were arguing about Roy not telling that his father abandoned him and that he was adopted by Roy Jr.?
4. On page 34 when Celestial was remembering tutoring teen mothers, her supervisor implied that it was her duty to have children to counteract all of the teen mothers and their children.  Do you think this was her duty?
5. What did you think about the decision Roy and Celestial made to abort their baby because Roy was going to jail?   What would have happened if they had kept the baby?
6. When Celestial started to gain fame and won the award at the National Portrait Museum, she did not tell people that Roy was in jail because she thought it would take away from her art.  Do you agree?
7. The doll that won the award (see #6) was a likeness of Roy and Celestial dressed it in prison clothes.  She felt changing the clothing from baby clothes to prison clothes moved it from a toy to art.  Do you agree?  Why did she have to again use Roy’s image?
8. After several years Celestial told Roy that she no longer wanted to be married.  Could you understand her wishes?  Later then, when he said he did not want to see her, she accused him of being unkind because, “I can’t be exactly the way you want me to be” (page 88).  Who was being unkind?
9. Were you surprised to read that Andre loved Celestial?
10. After Roy was released and Andre came to Eloe to tell him about Andre and Celestial, Roy Sr. let Andre come knowing that Roy Jr. then would have time alone with Celestial.   Roy Sr. told Andre that he “didn’t listen to nothing but my heart” (page 222) when marrying Olive.  How is that different from what Andre was doing with Celestial?  Was Roy Sr. being fair to Andre and Celestial?
11. Why do you think Davina took in Roy the way she did right after he was released?  Were you surprised they ended up together at the end of the novel?
12. Celestial visited Olive when she was in hospice care and told her that Roy was in prison with his biological father (page 189).   Olive died two days later.   On page 189 Roy Sr. told Roy Jr. that after Celestial told her, “she gave up.”  On the other hand, on page 294, Celestial told Roy, “When she knew you weren’t by yourself, she could finally let go.”  Which explanation do you think is correct?
13. There were major themes addressed in the novel: being a strong woman; prejudice toward blacks, particularly in the court system; black culture vs. white; being falsely accused and jailed.  How important were each of these to the story?  Would the story be as effective, or more effective, if some things had been left out or switched around?
14. When Roy was talking to Andre about Walter (page 147), how did you feel about the use of the “n” word?
15. Was anyone clearly in the wrong in the story?  If so, who?  Was there anything the characters could have done better or differently?
16. Did you like the ending?   At the end, Roy shared with Celestial advice he got from Walter, “My prayer for you is peace, which is something you have to make. You can’t just have it” (page306).  How did each of the characters find peace?
17. If you liked the story, when did your interest get hooked?

*****
First Semester Success, 2nd edition, by Dr. Arden B. Hamer, is now available as an eBook.  The paper edition will be released soon.  Click on the upper right link.